by Paul Kearney
He spoke of the rise of Bionar, greatest nation of the earth, but one that had been cursed by the endless wars over the fate of the barren Goliad, wherein legend had it mankind had woken and taken its first steps under the watchful eyes of the last angels. He recalled with narrowed stare the white wastes of the Winterpack Sea, the pancake ice crackling past his bows and on the horizon the blinding peaks of the Krescir, which no man had ever climbed. And then, puffing smoke, he would switch tack, and wax lyrical about the souks of Kassa, the spice-tang heavy in the hot air about the stalls, the silk-clad jeremdhar of the Khalif striding by with golden apples on the butts of their spears, and beyond the ochre walls of ancient Khasos the shimmering expanse of the Gokran, birthplace of scorpions.
He would speak freely about any country, kingdom, or sea lane in the world, but when Rol asked the questions he most wanted answering, Grandfather’s seamed face would shut. Of his own origins, Rol knew only that his parents were dead, and that he had been born at sea, and was thus a citizen of no land in the world. The rest was hints and riddles, and not even overindulgence in barley beer could pry more out of the old man.
So the first dark half of the winter passed, the fifteenth of Rol’s life.
Two
RAN’S HUMOR
THE STORMS WERE BAD THAT YEAR, RUNNING IN FRENZIED abandon across the face of the sea and battening onto the ragged coast as though determined to drag it down into the deeps. All across the Seven Isles, men made sacrifice to Ussa, imploring her to restrain her wild husband, and even Grandfather slit a runt piglet’s throat in deference to the Storm-Lord, though he did so as grudgingly as a Dennifreian, and tossed its little carcass over the sea cliffs with surly reluctance.
So high were the waves that Rol and Morin had to haul Gannet farther up the beach and make for her a new berth well above the high watermark. There she lay moored fore and aft to great boulders while the sea foamed four fathoms astern in impotent rage and a northwesterly gale shrieked about the sea cliffs. The Gannet was no light craft, and for perhaps the first time Rol realized just how strong Morin was. The big man grasped her bowline and hauled her up the shingle by main force. Rol had to shout at him to slow down, as the stones had begun to rasp splinters off her keel and bottom timbers to expose the white wood.
He examined the damage while Morin stood by rubbing his palms together in contrition. “I hurt Gannet?”
“No great problem, I think. A spot of pitch here and there will cover it. You go on home. It’s getting dark anyway. The pitch pot is down in the hold. I’ll root it out and bring it back with me. We’ll never get a fire started here.”
Morin nodded obediently. He ran one huge hand over Gannet’s gunwale apologetically, and then turned to put the screaming wind at his back and begin the climb back up out of the cove to Eyrie.
The hold was dark and evil-smelling and Rol located the sticky pitch pot by touch alone. A crab scuttled out from under his questing fingers and the accumulated miasma of a million netted fish tempted his gorge to rise. He clambered out into the storm-tossed air with relief, glad of the clean howl of the wind.
And stopped as he caught sight of the figure leaning casually against Gannet’s sternpost.
A small man dressed in odd, shimmering gray garments the like of which Rol had never seen before. Grandfather had described such material, though, or something like it. Fishpelt, the skin of a semilegendary deep-sea creature. The man was dark and bearded, and he stared out to sea as though this were his own boat he was leaning against and he was contemplating her proper element. Rol froze, the pitch pot swinging heavy in his hand.
“There will be a good haul of drift in the morning,” the man said. His voice was light, yet it carried over the wind effortlessly, as though made way for. “The Banks are on the move; there will be men drowned by sunrise.” He turned and smiled, and Rol saw that his eyes were the color of the wind-sped waves he had been watching, cold as a night on the Winterpack.
“You have hauled up your craft in good time. I congratulate you.”
Rol found his voice, and straightened so that he was looking down on the stranger from the height of Gannet’s tilting deck. “Ran is greedy for ships. They are his playthings. You have to keep them out of his reach.”
One black brow rose, amused. “And who told you that, I wonder?”
“My grandfather. He was at sea all his life.”
“Hard-won wisdom. He is right, your grandfather. But Ran is not an evil god. Merely capricious.”
Rol dropped from the boat down onto the wet shingle. He was taller than the stranger, and a good deal broader, but there was something intimidating about the man.
“You are from Driol, along the coast?” he asked politely.
“No.” The stranger did not elaborate, but studied Rol with an appraising air. “You are a long way from home, young Ordiseyn, and I see ten million waves yet to roll under your keel. Many is the green sea that you will go over, and in the end many a green sea will go over you; but not yet.”
“My name is Cortishane,” Rol said, somewhat alarmed to find that he was talking to a babbling lunatic. He backed away, weighing the pitch pot in his fist and calculating the distance to the man’s head. The dirk in his bootleg seemed suddenly too far from his fingers.
The stranger grinned, a gesture that transformed his countenance into something bright and feral.
“Old Ardisan has been discreet,” he said in a low voice that the storm should have rendered inaudible. “Perhaps too much so. Listen here. There is a dead city in the delta of the Vosk. It was named after you, and you will go there one day. When you do, I shall be waiting.” He raised his head to stare at the black cloud that towered over the headland. “There is a storm coming by land as well as sea, and you will be in the eye of it. This cockleshell of yours had best be a weatherly craft.”
“I have to go now,” Rol said uneasily. “They’ll be missing me up at the house.”
The stranger nodded, and his manner brightened, became mocking. “One thing more, my lad. This idyll of Ardisan’s is at an end. Fate has come knocking at the door. I have a gift for you now that may ease your passage in the world. Hold out your hand.”
Rol immediately closed his free fingers into a fist and backed away. “Stay back, or you’ll have a face full of pitch.”
“I doubt it. The stuff in that pot is cold as a witch’s cunny.”
And somehow the man had darted forward, quick as a heron’s lunge, and had grasped Rol’s free hand in his own. His fingers were like cold iron, and they burned. Rol cried out and fell to his knees in the shingle. The stranger bent over him and forced open the fist, matched palm for palm. It felt as though the flesh of Rol’s hand were being seared through the very bone to the marrow. He screamed, but the sound was lost in the omnivorous roar of the wind. When he was released he fell backwards and a foaming wave crashed over him, the salt water pouring into his eyes, his ears and mouth. He rolled onto his side, staggered to his feet, and the next wave smashed into the backs of his thighs, toppling him once more. The man was gone, but Rol was sure he saw something sleek and black and shining leap into the rabid waves and disappear, before the salt spray blinded him once more.
He was floundering in waist-deep water—somehow he had rolled down the beach into the riotous breakers. He fought himself upright, his whole world a black and white storm of fuming water. The waves seemed to be trying to drag him out to sea, and there was cold laughter in their thunder. Finally he found himself by Gannet again, and he wrapped an arm about the wood of her sternpost. Staring at his pain-racked hand he thought he could make out a shape, a scallop of scar on the palm, but the light was going fast and his eyes were stinging with salt. He stumbled inland, up the face of the little cove, and did not stop until he had grass under his feet again and the bellow of the sea was muffled by the frowning cliffs below.
Lightning played about the headland, and there was a bright red glow that perplexed Rol. Then he heard shouting over the wind
and the pelting rain, and broke into a run toward Eyrie.
A mob of men with torches were milling there, perhaps a hundred on foot and another score on horseback, their cuirasses shining in the stormlit rain. They had surrounded the shuttered house and various of them were hammering at the closed door. Rol saw Serioc the Headman of Driol there, carrying a half pike and hitching at the weight of an ancient mail shirt on his back. He looked both self-important and embarrassed, like a man caught out giving charity. But the obvious leader of the crowd was a fully armored figure on a black destrier, his face almost invisible beneath the bedraggled plumes of his helm, which he kept twitching aside in irritation. Now and again he would lean in the saddle and speak to one of the other horsemen who clustered deferentially about him, and they would nod solemnly.
Rol wondered if he had slipped into some fevered, dream-lit madness. Clutching his injured hand to his breast, he dropped into the sodden heather a cable from the house, and watched as the pigs were run off squealing, Ayd’s vegetable garden was trampled, and Eyrie’s stout shutters were dunted and thumped by the butts of pikes and halberds. The more enterprising of the mob scrambled up onto the roof of the cottage and began thrusting pike-points down through the turves of the roof. However, they all scrambled hastily to the ground again when one of the penetrating pike-shafts was whipped out of its owner’s grasp and disappeared, only to re-emerge point first and with startling rapidity close to his backside.
“Come out now and we will be lenient, Cortishane,” the plumed horseman shouted, and the ill-tempered growl of the crowd went quiet. “It is the law. You are suspected of brewing witchery and must answer for it before the Marschal. By resisting arrest you will only make it worse.”
A silence, except for the billowing whine of the wind and the rattle of rain off armor. Out to sea thunder rumbled, like the bad-tempered muttering of some subterranean god. Then the entire throng of men jumped as the bars of Eyrie’s only door were drawn back within, and Rol’s grandfather stepped out into the rain. At once a score of crossbowmen put their foot in the stirrups of their weapons and pulled back the bowcords to set their quarrels.
“Lord Vasst. To think you should be out on such a night over such a trifling misunderstanding.” Rol’s grandfather smiled reasonably. Behind him, lamp- and firelight streamed out, to make of his bent frame a wizened silhouette. He leaned heavily on a blackthorn stick and in his free hand was nothing more threatening than an unlit pipe.
Nonetheless, the mass of men backed away from him, murmuring.
“Gossip and rumor make a fool’s justice, my lord. I have been here twenty years, and never yet harmed a soul, nor will I, if left in peace.”
“That ape-armed giant of yours scared my boy half to death,” a voice shouted fiercely from back in the crowd. “And do you think we don’t see the woman prowling the moors at night with those eyes of hers?”
An angry snarl of agreement eddied through the ranks of armed men. Lord Vasst held up a gauntleted hand.
“If you are innocent, Cortishane, then you and your family have nothing to fear from Dennifreian justice. But we are here to take you by force, if need be. Do not compel us to shed blood.”
The mob made way for a file of the liveried crossbowmen, their weapons now cocked and ready. Lying where he was, Rol could no longer make out the expression on his grandfather’s face, but he was sure beyond all doubt that for a moment the old man looked straight at him as he lay shivering in the heather, the lines about his eyes tightening.
Then Grandfather straightened, and leaned on his stick no more. When he spoke again, it was with a strong, carrying voice that seemed that of a much younger man.
“You are a gaggle of ignorant barbarians. I have encountered what you term justice on half the continents of the world; always it ends with a rope or a pitch-soaked stake. Leave this place now, or by Ran’s blood, I shall lay you dead.”
With that, he raised his arms skyward as if to try and grasp the lightning. Behind him, the gleam from within the cottage was blotted out by the huge bulk of Morin, and in Morin’s head two hungry green lights burned that had nothing human about them.
“Shoot him!” Lord Vasst screamed, his horse bucking under him. “He’ll spell us all!”
Rol found it hard to follow what happened next. There was a flash of emerald light, so brief it might have been tinted lightning. He distinctly heard the thock of the crossbows releasing. Men screamed and shouted and streamed away from Eyrie, knocking one another down. The horses shrieked and reared. Above them all, Morin reared up tall as a tree, his face transformed into the mask of a ravening beast—and behind him another, smaller shape sped out of the cottage with the same inhuman light in its eyes. It was prick-eared and feline with a twitching tail, but ran on two legs and yowled insanely before launching itself on Lord Vasst’s men.
The horsemen mastered their mounts and charged the two figures, swords swinging. The crossbowmen paused fifty yards from Rol’s hiding place and began to reload their weapons. Serioc was shouting at his fellow villagers to stand fast. A loose phalanx of the more resolute among them leveled their pikes and advanced back the way they had run, fear white in their faces under the branched flare of the lightning.
It could not be real. These things were impossible.
Rol started to his feet, but a strong hand grasped the back of his neck and forced his face down into the scratch and drip of the heather, and his grandfather’s voice said hoarsely, “Be still.”
They both watched as the villagers and horsemen closed in on whatever it was Morin and Ayd had become. Bodies and parts of bodies went flying through the air. Crossbow bolts rained down on a choked, writhing, screaming mass of boiling humanity and horseflesh, and the lightning played garishly overhead. The crossbowmen reloaded time after time, and edged closer to the cottage, the better to aim into the melee. Grandfather seized Rol’s hand. “Come with me.”
He ran like a young man, trailing Rol after him. The pair went unnoticed in the glare and the murk and the shining curtain of the rain. They did not stop until they were at the foot of the hagrolith that watched over the headland, some quarter mile from the house. Eyrie was burning from within by then, flames licking brightly out of the front door and curling up into the turf of the roof. Up on the roof the cat-thing that might have been Ayd snapped and snarled as the crossbow bolts rained down on her. Morin was a great broken carcass lying before the house, a beached whale that men flensed to pieces with sword and pike and halberd, the dark blood splashing up past their knees.
Grandfather leaned with his back to the hagrolith, and there was pain in the rasp of his breath. He put a hand to his side and Rol saw a crossbow bolt protruding obscenely there, the white flights blackened with the old man’s blood. Rol thought to take hold of it, but the old man slapped away his hands irritably. “No good. Leave it be.”
They watched the bright flames roar up in the night as Eyrie’s roof timbers gave with a groan, the house dying in agony whilst about it the surviving Dennifreians thrashed the heather with their weapons, and a knot set up two dark, dripping trophies upon stakes fashioned out of hewn saplings. Some men were still mounted, though most of the horses lay torn and lifeless about the house. One that was thrashing blindly in its own entrails was put out of its misery with a sword-thrust.
“They’ll find us,” Rol whispered. He was wet through and shivering. “We have to get away.”
“No. She’ll protect us. She’ll hide us from them.” And Grandfather looked up at the tip of the mossy stone above him and smiled through his pain. “Twenty years she has kept them from our door. But times change, it seems.” He shut his eyes for a moment and some kind of febrile strength left him. He was an old, withered man shot through the guts and bleeding his life out in the rain.
“Take Gannet, Rol. Leave this place and never come back.”
“Where shall we go?” Amazing that he could sit and talk calmly like this, when his whole life was burning down in front of his eyes, a
nd all he knew lay dying or dead about him. But his mind seemed remarkably clear. The palm of his left hand had ceased its burning.
“I stay here. You must go alone”—a hand held up to silence Rol’s protest—“and go now. You must go to Gascar. It’s six days’ sail with a fair wind, and this storm could not have been pointed better; you’ll have it on the larboard quarter. Steer west-nor’west—” He coughed, and something black as crushed berries was spat into his beard. Rol wiped it away, dry-eyed and staring.
“In the capital, Ascari, you must ask about the wharves for a man named Michal Psellos. Tell him you are a Cortishane. He is—he is a friend.”
“Why?” Rol asked. “Why did all this happen? Morin and Ayd—”
“You are not human,” the old man said harshly. “Morin and Ayd were your guardians. I summoned them for that purpose.”
“What am I?”
But the old man’s eyes were glazing over. “The pain is going now,” he whispered. “Never a good sign. Leave me, Rol.” And he shoved the boy away with surprising strength. Rol knelt and watched him struggle to breathe through the blood that was flooding his lungs. Once he said clearly, “Emilia,” and smiled up at the lightning.
